“If You March this Sunday, You Won’t Leave the Country Again” / Cubanet, Camilo Ernesto Olivera

Gorki during a prior arrest in August 2008
Gorki during a prior arrest in August 2008

Ultimatum from the political police to musician Goki Aguila, participant in the peaceful marches of the Ladies in White.

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Camilo Ernesto Olivera Peidro, Havana, 6 August 2015 – Tuesday, August 4, Gorki Aguila, leader of the punk band Porno for Ricardo, was visited at his home by an official from the PNR Sector (Revolutionary National Police). She tried, without success, to get Aguila to accept a badly drafted and irregular summons.

After that visit, on Wednesday at about midday, Gorki heard a knock on his apartment door. On opening, he found two police officers who were bringing orders to arrest him:

“I barely had time to make a couple of calls,” says the musician and host of the offline radio program Gear Shift. “Then, while I was being taken to the patrol car, I asked the agents the reason for the arrest. They did not know how to answer me.” continue reading

The patrol car took the route towards the well known Fifth Station in Playa township.

Kafka, in STASI version, according to State Security

“On arriving and being taken to the jail, I insisted that they explain why I was there. Then, the guard in charge of that area found out and told me: ‘You are here for an interview with CI (Counter-Intelligence).’ The other guards looked at me as if I were the most sought after criminal in Cuba. They said: ‘If CI summoned you, it is because they have something heavy against you.’ No one wanted to accept that I could be a prisoner just for thinking or acting politically differently.”

After more than two hours, Gorki was taken to an office inside the station itself. There he had a meeting with an officer from State Security who did not identify himself. This one, in a hectoring tone, threatened the musician:

“The agent told me: ‘If you go this next Sunday to the Ladies in White, you will never leave this country again. Those who have invited you to play in the United States are going to have to get you on a raft. I am personally going to make sure you are not able to leave from the airport.’”

Gorki thinks that “these officers are sick with impunity. They really believe that this system is going to last forever. Their bosses make them think that. We are all buried in a blend of the films ‘The Lives of Others’ and Kafka’s story ‘The Process,’” added the musician.

Gorki in his studio. (Photo by author)
Gorki in his studio. (Photo by author)

Porno Para Ricardo, the Ladies in White, Kerry and the Pope

The band Porno Para Ricardo is scheduled to travel to the US to join a tour. On prior occasions, the group’s musicians were held on the island by express order of Cuban security. Gorki has had to travel via Mexico and turn to session musicians hired by the sponsors in order to be able to perform.

“There are two important visits coming up which have these repressors very nervous. One of these is the American Secretary of State John Kerry. The other is Pope Francis in September. I don’t doubt that they are gearing up for a flash wave of repression. They will do it, as soon as they have the American flag waving at the embassy across from the Malecon,” he says.

At the beginning of July, Gorki Aguila debuted his theme entitled “Ladies in White” in Gandhi Park, near the Santa Rita Church. He did it surrounded by the respect and emotion of these brave women and the activist members of the Forum for Rights and Freedoms. A little latter, everyone marched in defiance of repression. They have continued to do so. They will do it again next Sunday.

About the Author: Camilo Ernesto Olivera Peidro

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

They Arrest Gorki Aguila, Leader of the Rock Band Porno Para Ricardo / Cubanet, Camilo Ernesto Olivera

Gorki Aguila, file photo
Gorki Aguila, file photo
Cubanet.org, Camilo Ernesto Olivera Peidro, Havana, 5 August 2015 – Around noon Wednesday, musician Gorki Aguila was arrested, and his whereabouts are unknown.

The vocalist for the rock band Porno para Ricardo managed to communicate via telephone with this reporter just when two police officers presented themselves at the door of his home in order to take him. They did not explain the reason for his arrest or identify the place where they would take him.

Days earlier, law enforcement officers had approached Gorki Aguila’s house in order to bring him a police summons. Given apparent irregularities in the preparation of the document, the artist refused to sign it.

This arrest occurs within a few days of the arrival of the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to Havana for the inauguration of the American Embassy.

Translated by MLK

Antonio Rodiles’ Passport is Renewed / Cubanet

Antonio G. Rodiles (file photo
Antonio G. Rodiles (file photo

cubanet square logoCubanet, Ernesto Garcia Diaz, Havana, 2 August 2015 — The Cuban government has renewed the passport of political activist and coordinator of the project State of Sats, Antonio Rodiles. In contrast, Ailer Mena Gonzalez, artistic director of this project, remains under immigration regulations, that is, is not allowed to travel.

Rodiles told Cubanet, ” State Security lifted the restriction they had on me, I was about to renew my passport a few hours ago, I can leave the country. In fact I will in the coming hours. But I’ll be back soon to continue, at the side of the Ladies in White, the peaceful struggle for the liberation of political prisoners. The government is afraid of the public space we have conquered. It is no wonder they repress us. We want to rebuild the nation and will not allow them to dehumaize us, even when the call in repressive mobs.”

The activist also said: “I’ll be back before August 14 when John Kerry will Cuba and hoist the flag of the United States embassy. Hopefully he will demand that the Cuban government end the repression against the Ladies in White and we will have a different mentality. ”

Author: ernestogardiaz@gmail.com

Cancer from High Levels of Metals in Reservoirs? (II) / Cubanet, Ernesto Perez Chang

In spite of the contamination of Cuban bays, health authorities do not prevent fishing and bathing (photo by the author)
In spite of the contamination of Cuban bays, health authorities do not prevent fishing and bathing (photo by the author)

Cubanet.org, Ernesto Perez Chang, Havana, 28 July 2015 – Between the years 2004 and 2007, 65 children from the Los Sitios neighborhood in Central Havana, 7 to 10 years of age, underwent testing in order to determine their degree of lead poisoning. The research, conducted by a team of researchers from the Cuban National Institute of Health, Epidemiology and Microbiology (INHEM), found that 46.2% of the children exceeded the acceptable levels for adults according to the World Health Organization (10.0 mg/dl) and that 67.7% already were demonstrating learning difficulties associated with poisoning from this heavy metal.

According to the scientists, who recommended extending the investigation to other areas of the capital, the group of those affected presented with “diminished reading abilities, more limited vocabulary, poor reasoning, very slow reactions and poor psychomotor coordination.” Also, concern about the long term consequences was raised due to lead exposure being associated not only with reduction in academic performance but with changes in hearing, behavior, low self esteem, suicide attempts, depressive syndromes, aggression, and even mental retardation or death. continue reading

Perhaps because the research involved some “taboo topics” in the official public debate like childhood, health and the poor living conditions of Cubans, the results were not repeated in national press outlets, even though they were published in issue number 47(2) of 2009 of the Cuban Magazine of Health and Epidemiology [found at http://scielo.sld.cu; most of the studies mentioned here are available on the internet], and years before, in 2003, the INHEM magazine itself had brought to light a study1 by several of its researchers about lead levels also in children in the Central Havana township, perhaps one of the most affected by the poor health-sanitation conditions and by its location in a highly contaminated area.

Works like the foregoing join a list of investigations developed by Cuban scientists who belong to official institutions which signal the catastrophic effects of the island’s ineffective environmental policy, especially because of the link they observe with direct damage to human health.

Official Sources Note the Problem

In early 2015, the first issue of the digital magazine Science on Your PC, corresponding to January-March, published the extract from a dissertation2 by a group of researchers from the University of the East in Santiago, Cuba, about the low risk-perception and disinformation on the part of the residents of fishing communities about heavy metal contamination in the waters of the bay and surrounding areas.

According to the study, even though the Santiago Bay ecosystem is highly contaminated, there exists no government strategy to curb the negative effects of the heavy metals on the health of the residents of the city. Similarly, the inhabitants and even the fishing cooperative workers receive no information about the toxicity of the waters and the foods that they extract from them.

Santiago is, after the bay of Havana, the most poisoned on the island, and several sources discharge contamination into it such as the Antonio Maceo Thermoelectric Center, the November 30 Forming Company Electroplating Plant, the Celia Sanchez Textile Company, the repair workshops of the Electric Company and the Polygraphic. All use the principal rivers and their tributaries to discharge wastes without any effective filtration.

Despite this, according to the research, in the area “everyone claims that they have never been kept from fishing (…) This prohibition on fishing has been imposed only in the event of an outbreak of diarrheal illnesses and, of course, in the case of a closed season as with shrimp. (…) None of those interviewed from the fishing grounds knows about the heavy metals; they have not even heard this term.”

People from other regions of the country, also visibly affected by pollution, demonstrate equal ignorance about the phenomenon. The government’s policies of concealment in most cases are due to economic strategies, as deduced by those investigations that link cancer levels to the degree of contamination of the waters in mining or highly industrialized areas.

Dump next to a water source (photo by the author)
Dump next to a water source (photo by the author)

In the research report “Cleaner Production Strategy for the INPUD Galvanic Factory” (2006)3, the authors, belonging to the Central University of Las Villas, recognize that the main factor that impeded the design of a filtration system for heavy metals and toxic residues in the galvanic factory of the National Industry Producing Domestic Appliances (INPUD) was the impossibility of developing means of environmental protection because these raised the costs of production, a luxury that the Cuban economy could not afford, much less in the middle of the program called “Energetic Revolution” promoted by Fidel Castro, where he required them to commit to producing 350,000 pressure cookers benefitting the “Battle of Ideas.”

According to the researchers, at that time, “the treatment at the end of the pipe [filtration of pollution discharged into rivers and reservoirs] was improving the contamination problem but not reducing the costs [of production],” in a factory that employed Czech technology from 1964, “with very deteriorated technology and obvious obsolescence.”

In 2001, the factory had put into operation a wastewater treatment plant, but at the same time, it encountered construction problems because of which chrome and nickel wastes continued to be discharged directly into a small stream and from this to the Arroyo Grande dam, belonging to the Rio Sagua watershed with an area of more than 2,000 km².

This discharge into the groundwaters of the region could be related to the high levels of cancer that was reported by the province of Villa Clara where the highest incidence of cases on the island is recorded, according to statistics from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health itself.

In that regard, a report entitled “Contribution to Environmental Management in the Context of Urban Agricultural Production in the City of Santa Clara,” carried out between January and February of 2009 by a group of authors from the Provincial Meteorological Center and the Agricultural Research Center of the Central University of Las Villas, found high concentrations of lead, cadmium, nickel and other harmful substances in the soils and waters of several urban agriculture production systems in the city of Santa Clara. On comparing them to the standard established by Cuban regulation NC-493, from 2006, it was observed that “in organic gardens the concentrations of heavy metals were greater (…) with possible risk in some cases for human health.”

Similar studies, but focused on the petroleum areas of Boca de Jaruco in Santa Cruz del Norte and in a town near a goldmine on the Island of Youth, show that one of the fundamental reasons that the investigations are not disseminated and that urgent measures are not taken is the government’s economic interests.

In 2003, the magazine Earth and Space Sciences [Vol. 4, pp. 27-33], published the study “Arsenic and Heavy Metals in the Waters in the Area of Delita, Island of Youth, Cuba,” by a group of scientists from the Geophysical and Astronomical Institute and from the National Hydraulic Resources Institute.”

The text speaks of “a reduction in the maximum permissible limit for arsenic in drinking water,” which had unleashed the onset of chronic illnesses like cancer in people who had ingested drinking water with lethal concentrations of arsenic for long periods.

Populations from Batey de la Mina and from the Delita goldmine in the southeast of the Island of Youth, were and are exposed to arsenic concentrations higher than the detectable limit. In the Manantial La Mina station alone were recorded values that exceed the Cuban regulation of 50 mg/L-1 as well as the World Health Organization guideline of 10 mg/L-1.

The “Benign” Purpose of the Studies

In spite of these alarming measurements, according to what the investigators themselves expressed, all the clinical studies that have been carried out in the area by governmental agencies interested in the territory’s tourist development were for the express purpose of demonstrating the “therapeutic benefits of Delita’s waters and sludges” and not to connect the appearance and behavior of diverse illnesses with the ingestion and external use of arsenical waters.

Escolares-de-Centro-Habana-mostraron-altos-niveles-de-plomo-en-sangre-debido-a-la-exposición-a-fuentes-contaminantes-como-la-bahía-habanera.
Students from Central Havana demonstrated high blood-lead levels due to exposure to polluted sources like the Havana Bay (photo by the author)

The group of Cuban researchers is aware of the toxic impact on residents’ health in the so-called “special township” that, in recent years, has demonstrated a rising trend in mortality rates from cerebro-vascular diseases, notably exceeding other regions of the country: “The clinic where the residents of Batey de la Mina, the Argelia Victoria People’s Council No. 6, are treated, has shown a marked increase in the years 1994, 1996 and 1999.”

“If one considers,” continues the final report of the study, “the transit time of the underground waters from Delita, which is 13 years (…) and subtract those years from the date of the first increase in deaths from this cause (1994), the resulting date is 1981, which marks the beginning of the decade in which the most important exploration studies were carried out in the mine, as well as the drainage and direct dumping of the underground waters on the surface (1982), showing some possible relationship between these events. (…) Furthermore, although there exists no detailed study by clinics and areas that indicate the behavior of those dead from malignant tumors, this condition constitutes the main cause of death in adults as well as of premature death in the township, also with an upward trend in the last decade. Lung cancer (…) has shown a startling increase between the years 2000 and 2001 for the whole township.”

According to other researchers, Delita’s reservoir area is regarded as a uranium mining prospect, a considerable concentration of this element having been identified in a sample from the deep part.

The thousands of facts offered in the studies carried out by state scientific institutions themselves exceed the limits of these pages, and at the same time, contradict many aspects of the Cuban government’s official discourse that speaks of health programs and educational strategies but persists in ignoring a true environmental catastrophe that threatens to transform into another nightmare that new chapter of the Cuban revolution that has been referred to as “prosperous and sustainable socialism.”

References

1Aguilar Valdés, J. et al., “Niveles de plomo en sangre y factores asociados, en niños del municipio de Centro Habana”, Revista Cubana de Higiene y Epidemiología, 2003; 41(1).

Rodríguez Heredia, Dunia et al., “Educación ambiental vs. baja percepción acerca de la contaminación por metales pesados en comunidades costeras”, Ciencia en su PC, 2015, enero-marzo, 1, 13-28. Centro de Estudios Multidisciplinarios de Zonas Costeras (CEMZOC), Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba.

3 Cachaldora Francisco, Isidro Javier et al., “Estrategia de producción más limpia para el taller galvánico de INPUD”, Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas (2006).

EPC448.thumbnail (1)Read author bio here: Ernest Perez Chang

 

 

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

 

Contaminated Aquifers, Cause for Alarm / Cubanet, Ernesto Perez Chang

High levels of lead and other metals harmful to health have been detected in reservoirs intended for human use
High levels of lead and other metals harmful to health have been detected in reservoirs intended for human use

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Ernesto Perez Chang, Havana, 23 July 2015 – Although they have not been properly disclosed, in spite of their great importance, numerous studies carried out repeatedly by teams of Cuban scientists have raised the alarm about the critical state of Cuba’s main aquifers.

The detection of high levels of lead and other heavy metals harmful to human health in lakes and reservoirs intended for human use and for work related to agriculture and fisheries suggest that this could be one of the main causes for the increase among the Cuban population of cancer and other illnesses related to prolonged exposure to toxic substances.

The Ejercito Rebelde dam receives wastes from the nearby Antillana de Acero (photo from the internet)
The Ejercito Rebelde dam receives wastes from the nearby Antillana de Acero (photo from the internet)

While the phenomenon afflicts all the country’s provinces, Havana is the region most affected because, first, it is surrounded by several landfills capable of leaking highly toxic elements into underground waters that feed sources destined to supply the capital; and, second, most industries do not comply with international norms for the treatment of wastes and the filtering of harmful gas emissions, and they even discharge wastes directly into river basins like the Almendares, which crosses the capital and whose waters are used on farmlands. continue reading

A study published in 2013 conducted by a team of specialists from the Laboratory of Environmental Analysis, part of Cuba’s Higher Institute of Applied Technologies and Sciences, reported the levels of highly toxic substances in the soils of and produce grown on 17 farms dedicated to urban agriculture, all located within two kilometers of the 100th Street landfill to the west of the capital.

According to the research, the soil of half the farms exceeded the ranges at which heavy metals, like lead, are usually found in Cuban agricultural soils, while a high percentage exceeded levels considered toxic according to some international standards. Similarly, 12.5 per cent of the vegetable samples collected exceeded the maximum permissible limits of this contaminant in foods intended for human consumption established by Cuban regulation NC 493 of 2006.

One of the areas that most worries those who are familiar with this phenomenon, about which nothing is said in the official press outlets, is the Ejercito Rebelde dam, built in 1976 south of the capital and considered one of the largest stores of “potable water” in the western region.

Surrounded by highly polluting industries like the steelmaker Antillana de Acero and giant dumps like Cotorro, the lake has been singled out by several scientific groups as a danger to human health since analyses of its sediments as well as of its flora and fauna have revealed lethal concentrations of heavy metals and other harmful substances.

In spite of the released warnings – almost always by digital academic publications of limited circulation – state fishing cooperatives that sell their products in the capital’s markets continue to operate there, while the regional authorities do very little to prevent the area’s inhabitants from coming to fish, swim or wash cars at the banks of the reservoir.

The oil stains and countless accumulations of rubbish that surround the dam speak for themselves of the government’s lack of control and the ignorance of the people about the danger to which they are exposed.

A scientific study from 2005 had already detected high levels of lead, zinc, cadmium and copper in the so-called “Almendares-Vento” basin as well as at the Ejercito Rebelde dam.

In its report, the team of analysts from Cuba’s Higher Institute of Applied Technologies and Sciences explained that such levels of contamination were due, in large measure, “to inadequate hygienic-sanitary coverage and industrialization without regard to protective measures for the environment.”

In order to have an idea of how terrible it could be now as well as in the future just for Havana, the Almendares-Vento watershed (which also includes the Ejercito Rebelde dam), provides almost half of all the potable water that the city’s populace consumes and a good part of its food. The heavy metals are extremely toxic even in relatively low concentrations, they are not biodegradable, and, to the contrary, they accumulate through the food chain.

To understand the gravity of the situation – both because of the discharged contaminants in our waters and the authorities’ willingness to conceal or disinterest in the matter – it suffices to refer to the body of research that, although carried out by Cuban institutions and experts, almost exclusively circulates outside of the island in foreign digital scientific media, while domestic publications keep their distance from what already constitutes a real silent tragedy.

The appalling hygiene and sanitation conditions of the capital influence the contamination levels (photo by the author)
The appalling hygiene and sanitation conditions of the capital influence the contamination levels (photo by the author)

Tables and info-graphics from several studies of the aquifers of Havana and the San Juan and Cobre rivers in Santiago de Cuba, among others, show the accumulation levels of heavy metals comparable to heavily industrialized areas of Europe. Chemical contaminants have also been found in species captured in the Guancanayabo Gulf and at the Hanabanilla dam in Villa Clara. Investigations by the Metallurgical Mining Institute of Holguin also have detected elevated concentrations of sulfates, nickel, chromium, manganese and iron in the groundwater of Moa.

http://www.revistaaquatic.com/aquatic/art.asp?t=p&c=231
Antillana de Acero and other industries near the dam do not comply with environmental regulations (photo by the author)
Graph from one of the studies showing levels of contamination in Havana’s water
Graph from one of the studies showing levels of contamination in Havana’s water
Oil stains line the Ejercito Rebelde dam in Havana (photo by the author)
Oil stains line the Ejercito Rebelde dam in Havana (photo by the author)
Small dumps skirt the dam (photo by the author)
Small dumps skirt the dam (photo by the author)
Drivers wash trucks and cars in the reservoir (photo by the author)
Drivers wash trucks and cars in the reservoir (photo by the author)

EPC448.thumbnail (1)Ernest Perez Chang

 

 

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

Official Writers: The Good Life is Over / Cubanet, Ernesto Perez Chang

Miguel Barnet and Abel Prieto may be exempt, but what will happen to others like Pablo Armando Fernandez? (photo taken from the Internet)
Miguel Barnet and Abel Prieto may be exempt, but what will happen to others like Pablo Armando Fernandez? (photo taken from the Internet)

Now that the slogan is economic profitability, what will happen to all the mediocre but loyal intellectuals?

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Ernesto Perez Chang, Havana, 20 July 2015 – In that “without haste but without pause”* race to impose a new economic model that might alleviate the ravages of Fidel Castro’s despotism, in Cuba some are wondering if the changes will positively or negatively affect the forms of cultural management to which a majority of writers and artists have been accustomed.

I am referring to the model that has permitted many of them to live, sometimes well, sometimes not, but “without breaking a sweat,” meaning publishing books that no one reads and that will never be sold; receiving prizes and distinctions for a lifetime of submissive work; manipulating competitions; plundering travel allowances or missions to Venezuela; haggling over, in the offices of the Culture Ministry, frequent departures to fairs and events abroad; being the official lapdog who paves the way to court, and turning himself into a character that is half rogue and half leftist intellectual who says he has renounced international success due to his “revolutionary commitment.”

Many questions arise now that all those who have lived off of – and even thrived from – the “profitability” of those false loyalties are on a leaky boat in the middle of a stormy sea. continue reading

However, the need that absolutely everything on the island be economically profitable has placed writers as well as the government at a crossroads, breaking an old loyalty pact in which political power ensured the feeding of the ego of that other party, bothersome, who mastered words, all in exchange for complicity.

Under that convention, real writers fled, joined the internal resistance or adapted to the circumstances while, out of the mediocrity there were born hordes of producers of texts without conflicts that only would have served as a backdrop to that illusory cultural conformity environment, of a gilded world, that seems to exist only in bookstores and book fairs.

But now, when the deal has been broken and entrepreneurial profitability is sought, will Cuban writers continue publishing according to that “quota system” established by the island’s publishers and magazines under which the single fact of being a member of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, UNEAC, or feigning political obedience ensures that you remain in the publishing plans at least once a year?

What even will be the fate of UNEAC or the Cuban Book Institute? Will their true roles as thought “managers” be revealed?

What even will be UNEAC’s fate! (photo courtesy of the author)
What even will be UNEAC’s fate! (photo courtesy of the author)

What will happen to the thousands of mediocre but faithful “intellectuals” whom the government will have to ignore if it does not want to continue maintaining a no longer useful claque, especially in an era when the touch screen of a tablet or a cell phone is more attractive than a rough paper surface in black and white?

The new official discourse, no longer based on the egalitarianism of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto but on the life raft that are Marino Murillo’s “Economic Guidelines,” is repetitive with respect to the total elimination of gratuities and quite insistent on the rapid transformation of state-subsidized entities into businesses forced to be profitable in order to be able to continue existing.

However, everything works as a trap. Statutes governing self employment do not allow the creation of publishing cooperatives or those initiatives that encourage a cultural environment alternative to that other one controlled, supervised, censored by the Communist Party and State Security.

Writers, if they want to be profitable, that is, if they want to avoid starving to death, will be obliged, much more than before, to write what they are asked to write, to adhere to the margins of tolerance, to feign greater fidelity or, on the other hand, to try their luck abroad or, simply, to change jobs to something much more promising in the Port of Mariel Special Development Zone. After all, the “general president” has already said it; the first thing is the economy while the term “culture,” in the official discourse, has gotten divorced from utopia in order to marry trade. “Economic culture,” “market culture,” “entrepreneurial culture” are the seasonal pairings.

“We writers are screwed,” say several friends who accept the uncertainty of the times. Managing to enter the international publishing market is a true feat for any writer, Cuban or not. The negligible likelihood of something like that happening increases fear, and analyzing the few opportunities for survival without sacrificing the writing trade, the only path to choose is to continue with the pact of silence as long as the storm lasts.

That fear of being on the outside and on their own can only partly explain why, in contrast with musicians and filmmakers, Cuban writers avoid disobedience and feign living outside of politics; however, they are naïve to ignore that now their former role as vassals is not useful in a world where money has completely displaced the word. Now, clearly, the government is not prepared to invest money and time in breeding what it has always seen as a caste of spongers and would-be traitors.

Although always committed to not publishing writers opposed to the Revolution or works that could unleash the demons among the mob, publishers and other Cuban cultural institutions, which until yesterday functioned under an impression of art for art’s sake where the official resolution of “art for socialist ideology” was disguised, now have been forced to redesign their profiles and undertake the race for survival, an eventuality that suits the government perfectly and that will serve to sweep away all the poets and narrators who offer nothing substantial to the building of that rare socialism financed with capital from the Empire.

That rare socialism financed with capital from the Empire! (photo courtesy of the author)
That rare socialism financed with capital from the Empire! (photo courtesy of the author)

The total elimination of state subsidies, the reduction in publishing plans, the cutbacks in author copyright payments, the massive layoffs from publishers, the assumption of business strategies that take them further from their foundational principles and that transform the editorial element, that is to say, the true reason for a business to exist, into a secondary matter, has been a true earthquake for those who trusted that, for culture, any future time would have to be better.

Now it means speaking and writing less and working more, is what the Cuban government says, which also has replaced its traditional “fleet” of literati for a torrent of ideologues capable of providing to the people that “Revolutionary” literature indispensable for pretending that nothing falls apart: military officers with too much free time and turned into historians, State Security agents turned novelists and poets, historians feeding the revolutionary epic, children of Raul and Fidel occupying the printers with their manias and cravings, all the Book Fairs revolving around them, while the writers attend the end of times, their own extinctions, with the calmness of cattle led to slaughter, just for fear of breaking the silence.

*Translator’s note: Words from a 2014 speech by Raul Castro to the National Assembly about “updating the Cuban economic model.”

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

About the Author

EPC448.thumbnailErnest Perez Chang: a bio is here

 

Cuba and the Vatican: the Miracle that Never Arrives / Miriam Celaya

John Paul II and Francis (internet photo)
John Paul II and Francis (internet photo)

Cubans will continue to leave for places where they believe God has placed his hand beyond the intervention of his Holiness

cubanet square logoCubanet, Miriam Celaya, Havana, 7 July 2015 — It’s been 17 years since a head of Vatican State visited the Island for the first time. John Paul II arrived in Cuba in 1998, preceded by his well-deserved reputation. He had played an important role in the Polish transition – his native country — where democracy was finally achieved after decades of subordination to Soviet communism.

Such credentials of the Pilgrim Pope aroused expectations among many Cubans still being hit by the deepest economic crisis in its history, and also hopeful about the possibility of an eventual transition derived from some “easing” of the rigid centralism of the economy and politics in the Island. They reasonably assumed that after so many shortages and scraping out a living, all that was left was for things to improve. In addition, it was unusual for a pope to honor us with his presence. National vanity reached unprecedented levels, and optimists of the day hoped that Jozef Wojtyla’s appeal would positively influence the goodwill of the Cuban government towards openness.

For even more reverie, the discourse of John Paul II before a square filled with a mixture of the faithful and the dilettante, and facing Che Guevara’s gigantic image, made an overt reference to the need to break the isolation endured by Cubans as a consequence of our political system: “Open Cuba to the world”, he said in his inspired homily to the delirious crowd listening, captivated and hopeful, as if, just by the Pope’s suggestion, the miracle of freedom and democracy for Cuba were to happen by osmosis. continue reading

The crowd, however, had their own reasons to believe in miracles. All in all, the government, which barely a decade before the Pope’s arrival had proclaimed itself as communist and atheist and had harassed the faithful of any religious denomination for 30 years, marginalizing and excluding them in what was a crusade in reverse — against the faithful to God — had carried out the spell from circulating the most intense hatred of everything that represented religion to legitimizing all faiths, and even blessing the entry of the religious into the ranks of the Communist Party. And it had accomplished this without gradations, without raising suspicion and, most importantly, without anyone asking for an explanation, since one of the most ineffable native virtues consists of confusing justice with amnesia.

Without a doubt, placing Marx and God on the same altar was the Revolution’s spiritual contribution that is yet to be properly recognized. Thus, a new specimen in the socialist fauna was born: the mystical Communist. Suddenly, being a believer became almost a stylish ornament. Christian crucifixes and Santería necklaces of African heritage proliferated happily among us, often mixed together as naturally as if they had never been banned, as if dozens of young Christians had not been shot at the La Cabaña Fortress, the concentration camps known as Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) had never existed, or as if the religious spirituality that had always been an essential part of the national culture had not been deeply hurt.

When John Paul II honored us with his presence, we were such a democratically religious country that Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes himself confessed to having Santería fetishes behind his door. And what about our Sinner-in-Chief, who personally welcomed the Holy Father and received his blessing from the Pope and from God, though he skipped confession in the process.

Nevertheless, the overall balance of the visit of John Paul II was positive, especially for the Cuban Catholic Church, which gained new social spaces, experienced a discreet vivacity and even founded magazines. Though their circulation is not large, these magazines are tolerated by the government and enjoy popular recognition. In the process we also recovered Christmas and the local clergy was granted permission for Our Lady of Charity to take a brief outing – in the manner of a procession — every September.

Since then, the world opened slightly to Cuba, though after Wojtyla’s departure, and to date, most Cubans continue locked up in this Island-jail without democratic freedoms and without the possibility to fully exercise of their rights.

The second Papal visit was in 2012, when Joseph Ratzinger, as Pope, reviewed the congregation’s membership of the hacienda in ruins, mainly to get some concessions from the substitute sinner for the Church. This time, the popular hopes had suffered a considerable decline, but Benedict also delivered his homily to the faithful in a mass — in which there were many representatives of Cuban émigrés — where he delivered another barrage of short-range blessings and left, not without witnessing a small turmoil by a political opponent who shouted slogans against the government and was brutally cut down by blows from a group of members of the national Red Cross, while around them the lambs of the flock remained undaunted, without even issuing a bleating.

Benedict XVI at the Plaza, Havana (Photo from the internet)
Benedict XVI at the Plaza, Havana (Photo from the internet)

Now it is the charismatic Pope Francis’s turn. He will come to Cuba this controversial 2015 with enviable credentials. If it were not enough that he is a Latin American, that he took part in the inspiration of the Liberation Theology, that he’s carrying out a fierce onslaught against corruption within the Vatican itself, or that he demonstrates the austerity and humility of the saint he choose for his Papal name, he enjoys the extraordinary merit of being a mediator in the current rapprochement between the governments of Cuba and the United States, thus helping to end the half century of hostility that has defined Cuban political and national life.

With such curriculum, coupled with such a resounding inspiring capacity that even the General-President in his recent meeting with the Pope experienced a kind of epiphany and promised to “go back to praying” — which shows that a metamorphosis from devout to Cuban Communist Party militant can be reversed — one would expect an avalanche of expectations among Cubans before the imminent visit. However, this is not what is seen on the streets.

The momentary wave of hope that uplifted Cuba with the December 17th announcement has faded with the absence of changes, though we no longer have an enemy at our doorstep. And Pope Francis will arrive in the midst of that feeling of apathy. He will arrive in a timely manner, before our emigration ends up emptying the entire Island. Because those who were very young when John Paul II visited have become adults, and many have fled Cuba. The dreams of prosperity and freedoms have crashed against the rampart of government inaction, and the cryptic speeches of the representatives of God are no longer enough to raise a new capital of faith. Very few here believe in Papal blessings.

After all, the Vatican is also a State, with its own government, policy, and interests. And — with apologies to the faithful — how could our hopes for freedoms interest those who, at least de jure, pin their greatest aspirations on the kingdom of heaven and not in the reality of earth? We have been numbed by the words of false prophets too often to place our expectations in another head of state. After 17 years since John Paul II set foot on Cuban soil, we are still not feeling the effects of his praises. Nobody –except the most obstinate dreamers — expects Francis to make miracles to effect the urgent changes Cuba requires.

Just in case, tens of thousands of Cubans still choose each year to seek blessings at their own risk, and are leaving for places where they believe God has placed his hand without the help of our Holiness at the Vatican. And this is the way it will remain, at least while the olive-green hell continues to dictate the guidelines in this damned Island.

Latest News: At Least Five Dead in Building Collapse in Havana Vieja / Cubanet, Ernesto Garcia Diaz

Site of a previous building collapse in Havana
Site of a previous building collapse in Havana

Cubanet, Ernesto Garcia Diaz, Havana (developing news), 15 July 2015 – At least five people died, according to preliminary reports, in a building collapse early this morning, at an apartment house at 413 Habana Street between Obrapia and Obispo, in Havana Vieja (Old Havana). Neighbors confirmed this to Cubanet, but other sources mentioned 11 deaths.

The intense rains of the previous afternoon destroyed the weak structure of the multi-family building and caused its partial collapse.

Among the dead are presumed two little girls and a teenage girl aged 18. Search and rescue brigades worked from the very early morning hours looking for any survivors who might be trapped in the old building.

While this was going on, family members of the victims and of people injured congregated at the polyclinic at Aguiar and Empedrado Streets. The situation is current very tense with regards to social order.

This information will be updated shortly.

Opponents Tried for Common Crimes / Cubanet, Augusto Cesar San Martin

Inmates in Cuban prison (from internet)
Inmates in Cuban prison (from internet)

The preference of trying political opponents for common crimes is not new. Thus is prevented the sullying of the regime’s image while giving cover to those who assert that in Cuba there are no political prisoners.

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Augusto Cesar San Martin, Havana, 10 July 2015 – The preference of trying the Cuban government’s political opponents for common crimes is not new.

Attorney Julio Alfredo Ferrer Tamayo, head of the Cuban Law Association (AJC) is in jail in Valle Grande awaiting a new trial and suspended from practice for four years. The lawyer faces a new criminal charge just when his six-month sentence for contempt was ending.

Such charge was imposed on Ferrer during his defense of his wife Marienys Pavo Anate. He demanded a mistrial on her behalf because of breaches of duty by public officials. continue reading

In his lawsuit against the judges, delivered in the Civil and Administrative Courtroom of the same Court, the lawyer from the AJC charged the process against his wife with being a “colossal fraud, with a worthless, corrupt and illegal vote,” as recorded in the judgment.

As a result of such incident, the farce against him ended up revealing itself when the judge from the Criminal Division of the Plaza of the Revolution Court considered “severe” the prosecutor’s request for seven months in jail for Contempt and lowered it to six months.

Lawyer Idilio Hernandez Herrera, legal representative for Ferrer, told Cubanet that the malice is proven by the first sanction, replacing the fine with jail as corrective discipline.

“To refer to my client they used words like corruption, documented falsities highly repudiated by society…irreverent and unethical lawyer. Which is to say the judges can use inappropriate language and prejudge the verdict,” said the defense lawyer.

“They are ordinary prisoners, not political”

The real ‘crime’ of the AJC lawyer is having used the administrative and procedural resources of Cuban law in order to demand the right of association.

The process summoned before the Provincial and Supreme Courts Maria Esther Reus, head of the Ministry of Justice (MINJUS), who delegated to the director of MINJUS Associations to declare in a trial why the AJC is not legally approved.

The next criminal process that Julio Alfredo Ferrer faces aims to eliminate any political or anti-governmental position that his conduct may describe.

He is accused of Falsification of Public Documents during the purchase of his home more than 10 years ago. Even when the notary who conducted the process testified in the oral trial to Ferrer’s innocence, the prosecutor petitioned for three years’ incarceration.

His representative Hernandez Herrera is convinced that the new accusation is a plan that intends to search at all costs for a civil violation so that he will be punished for ordinary crimes [i.e. not political ones].

“After they punish him for an ordinary crime, his defense becomes more difficult in international organizations for Human Rights, the Latin-American Court of Justice and the European Commission that have to do with lawyers,” explains Hernandez.

“This has been a political operative game by State Security with other factors very well organized in order to neutralize any kind of campaign for the freedom of my client,” he adds.

What is certain is that the government will keep the lawyer Julio Alfredo Ferrer Tamayo in jail without sullying the regime’s image and apparently will give cover to those who assert that in Cuba there are no political prisoners.

About the Author: Augusto Cesar San Martin

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

Killing for a Dwelling / Cubanet, Ernesto Perez Chang

A usual scene in Reparto Electrico, whether Holy Week or not
A usual scene in Reparto Electrico, whether Holy Week or not

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Ernesto Perez Chang, Havana, 1 July 2015 – A daughter killed her mother, dismembered her with the help of her boyfriend and then reported her missing in order to be able to inherit her humble apartment in a slum where they both lived. It may seem the plot of a horror movie but it is a real story that barely a year ago shook the community of Reparto Electrico.

It was not the first time I heard such chilling news as that; but more than the blood relationship between the victim and the murderer, the motive of the killer was what accentuated the absurdity, the insanity, especially when in the streets, while the crime was being talked about, equally disturbing stories emerged about family conflicts related to the difficulties in wrangling a place to live.

Before and after that bloody episode, I learned of other similar scenarios, and, according to Orlando Asdrubal, a lawyer who has followed several cases in the Arroyo Naranjo township, the bloody events within families are increasing, all related to housing property rights. continue reading

Although they do not always yield fatal outcomes, this kind of litigation accounts for almost half the cases heard in the courts: “Brother against brother, children against parents, and always it is because of a room, to inherit a shack, a little piece of land, four pesos. Too much violence, that is what poverty brings when there is hopelessness and desperation. That is one of the main attractions of the Cuban courts. Four cases out of ten have to do with housing,” says Orlando.

Amado Ibanez, resident of Centro Habana, illustrates for us with dozens of anecdotes how increasingly frequent are the bloody events related to housing and involving family members who have shared the same space for years: “Right here, on this street, every day there is a brawl and they have nothing to do with gangs or drugs or machismo, those are less frequent. The majority are because of one brother who wants to bounce another from the house or a child who wants to divide a room that is his father’s or uncle’s, and all that is sometimes with machetes.”

Violent events like these to which Amado refers are those that everyone hears about because they are frightening. However, there exist others that go unnoticed due to their everyday nature, more so in the current political-economic environment in which old people are classified as a social burden, an obstacle to development, although, paradoxically, that subliminal rhetoric comes from the discourse of our ruling elders.

Through the testimony one can hear on the street, from the mouths of neighbors, friends and work colleagues, one can sense that in Cuba many old people, whose only heritable property is the humble family home, die as victims of what could be considered “stealth killings,” most of the time at the hands of their own offspring.

Recently while riding on a bus, I could hear the conversation of two women. One was telling the other about how turbulent it was to share the home with her elderly father who suffered very advanced diabetes and episodes of senile dementia.

When one detailed the things that she did or left undone in order to hasten the death of the sick man (she left him alone at night, fed him a bad diet and even stopped administering his medicine to him), the other fearlessly advised her about the steps she should take to declare him incompetent, admit him to a health institution and inherit the property that was simply a small apartment with only one room. The gruesome plan was discussed aloud as if it had to do with an inoffensive plan to exterminate cockroaches.

On a more personal level, I have known neighbors who have died in the cruelest abandonment by their families without any governmental institution bothering to investigate in depth what happened and without any legal mechanism for reporting these cases in which one senses that, behind the supposed negligence, there are hidden true instances of premeditated murder.

A doctor from a clinic in Reparto Electrico, whose identity we withhold, says that in recent years instances of old or sick people dying because of the apathy of their relatives have increased and that, due to the lack of interest demonstrated by the institutions who should attend to this phenomenon, it is very difficult to prevent these tragedies.

“There is no way of knowing if the relative is acting out of ignorance or if the lack of attention is on purpose. I always am inclined to the latter. If, as a relative, you take responsibility for a sick person, you must do things just as the doctor indicates, but in the end you cannot complain about them for anything because neither the hospitals nor the nursing homes are capable of offering better attention. (…) I have had several cases where it is evident that there has been a murder. But how can I prove it? And not only that, how do I know that the police will pay attention to me?

“And worse, I am asking for them to come and stab me four times in the back for something that I cannot prove outright. (…) I have had many experiences but I don’t need to be a doctor to live them daily. For example, in the same building where I live. A neighbor, not very old, was partially paralyzed after a stroke so that she could not walk. With some physical therapy sessions and some more or less good care the woman was up, but her daughter did nothing. She had her thrown in bed and did not worry about feeding her. She died after a few months.

“I live here, and I know that every day there were fights about the apartment, I know that they left the woman to die, that they saw the opportunity to resolve the matter that way, finally, no one investigates. (…) For the government it is one less old person and another housing problem solved.”

The difficulties of getting housing in Cuba are not comparable to any other reality and it has been creating quite complex phenomena where official corruption, astronomic sale prices or political conditions for getting an assignment for a place to live are practically not problems in comparison with the tragedies that have occurred within families or with the loss of moral values and the degradation of human feelings to monstrous levels.

About the Author: Ernesto Perez Chang 

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

Elian Gonzalez: “If Cuba stopped being socialist it would be like Haiti” / Cubanet

Elian Gonzalez, "the little rafter," now 21
Elian Gonzalez, “the little Cuban rafter,” now 21

“And I read Fidel, I love to read Fidel. He likes to give me books, and sends me one whenever he can.”

cubanet square logoEFE, Havana, 27 June 2015 — Elián González, the “little Cuban rafter”, believes that if Cuba ceased to be socialist would be “a colony” and a poor country like Haiti, according to what he says in an interview published today in the official newspaper Granma.

“It should be clear that if Cuba ceased to be socialist, it would not be like the United States, it would be a colony, it would be Haiti, a poor country, much poorer than it is, and it would lose everything it has achieved,” says Gonzalez, 21, warning that sometimes young people believe that with capitalism the island would be a developed country like the United States, France or Italy.

Asked how he would like to see the future of Cuba, Gonzalez stressed that his hopes for the country are that it “develops” and he feels that in this sense it is “on the right track.” continue reading

“If Cuba loses its essence, it loses everything it has achieved with the Revolution, with Fidel and Raul in front, I would be very disappointed. It would reject all progress, all that has been done,” said Gonzalez, who at age five miraculously survived the shipwreck of a raft of illegal immigrants traveling to the United States with his mother, who died in the accident.

The “little rafter” was rescued by US fishermen and taken to relatives in Miami, Florida who took temporary custody of him, sparking a bitter legal, family and political dispute between the governments of the United States and Cuba, whose then president Fidel Castro supported Elian’s father, who lived on the island, in his desire to recover his son.

In his interview with the newspaper Granma, Elián González also referred to his career plans and reported that plans to join the military.

“Now I am studying at the Camilo Cienfuegos University of Matanzas, in my the fourth year of Industrial Engineering. I am a cadet planning to serve the Revolutionary Armed Forces when I finish my studies,” he said.

Gonzalez admits he likes studying, hanging out with his brothers and friends, watching TV shoes and movies, listening to music, in particular says he has learned to enjoy a genre not very popular in his generation, repentismo – a form of improvised oral poetry – and also enjoys swimming, baseball and football, although he is not a “fanatic” of the latter sport.

“And I read Fidel, I love to read Fidel. He likes to give me books, and sends me one whenever he can, and for me that is like a homework assignment and have to read it,” he said.

His opinion is that he does “nothing different” from other young people, “I simply have to be a young person of our times, knowing how to have fun, share, play sports, but also tied to the tasks of the Revolution, not losing the essence of how important it is for young people to carry out the country’s development.”

Politicians by Decree and Illiterate by Submission / Cubanet, Victor Manuel Dominguez

20080405035345-raulcubanet square logoCubanet.org, Victor Manuel Dominguez, Havana, 24 June 2015 – Abel Prieto rides again. Not as the author of two little novels whose names I cannot remember. Nor as the ex-president of a union of writers and authors more sold to the powers-that-be than self-help books at the Havana book fair, or reproductions of “Still Life with the Leader” at an art exposition committed to who knows what.

Never ever as that ex-minister of culture, with long hair and little sense, who declared that poets like Raul Rivera could be jailed, but they would not show up shot in the head at the edge of some ditch. Now, such a sad political figure, he rides as the cultural adviser to the Cuban president.

Other “Kultural Pajes”

As the Spanish writer Arturo Perez Reverte said in his article “Kultural Pajes” from the book With Intent to Offend, “The more illiterate the politicians are – in Spain those two words almost always are synonymous – the more they like to appear in the cultural pages of the newspapers.” continue reading

It happens here in Cuba, too. The difference is that here the lines fuse, and writers and artists are declared politicians by decree and illiterate by submission. Our politician-intellectuals also write or “sing” to the authorities, who sign a document to send innocents to the execution wall.

Therefore, Abel Prieto’s words to the Spanish daily El Pais are not strange although they are cynical: “The idea that we live in a regime that controls everything that the citizen consumes is a lie, an untenable caricature in this interconnected world.”

Saying that in a nation where the citizens are only interconnected, against their will, to registration offices, personnel files, surveillance centers, State Security and Interior Ministry monitoring and control departments or crime laboratories is a bluff.

The assertion that Cubans are at a high level of international connectedness would be pathetic, if it were not insulting, when we have not yet even overcome the barrier between the produce market and the stove, and they censor films, prohibit books, and pursue and seize antennas across the length and breadth of the country.

The Dark Object of Desire

According to Abel Prieto in El Pais, “We are not going to prohibit things. Prohibition makes the forbidden fruit attractive, the dark object of desire.” We had and have enough experience. From the prohibitions on listening to the Beatles or writing to a relative abroad to access to the internet.

Apparently among the secret guidelines issued by the Communist Party to its cadres in order to mend the nation is the obligatory reading of the poem Man’s Statutes by the Brazilian Thiago de Melo which in one of its verses he says: “Prohibiting is prohibited.” In Cuba only outwardly?

The reality is that Abel contradicts himself. While on one hand he assures that we are not going to prohibit, on the other he says that “we are never going to allow the market to dictate our cultural policy,” when everything is sold, from Lennon’s spectacles and Che’s beret to the sheet music of the National Anthem.

The strategic shield against cultural penetration designed by Abel (under the guidance of Cain: the State) is that it works against banality and frivolity so that people learn to differentiate, apparently, among the “exquisite” passages by Baby Lores about Fidel and the subversive themes of the Cuban rappers Los Aldeanos* (The Villagers).

Which is to say that, disguised as a demand for quality, absolute control of what citizens consume continues. They will not prohibit them, they will only give them the option, for the good of their cultural appreciation level, of seeing or hearing what the Cuban Minister of Culture, assisted by the Minister of the Interior, schedules.

Among Abel’s proposals against banality and frivolity is a “weekly packet” that includes films like The Maltese Falcon and Gandhi, the new Latin-American cinema, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, and a symphonic cocktail by Silvio Rodriguez with the Small Daylight Serenade, that delusional song about “I live in a free country/which can only be free…”

Also to be enjoyed are films by Woody Allen and other offerings that combine “things with cultural density and entertainment material” far from racism and violence, as if in the films about mambises – Cuba’s independence fighters of the wars of independence — the guerrillas and international soldiers fight with cakes, and meringue is spilled instead of blood.

The dark desire for total control by the State is intact. Beyond the linguistic juggling that government spokesmen perform within and outside of Cuba. And without denying a minimal (fortuitous) breach in what is consumed, we still are very far from choosing freely what we desire.

When Abel wonders, in his interview with El Pais, “What are we going to do with Don Quixote?” perhaps Marino Murillo and the company answer him: Send him to run an agricultural cooperative, assisted by Sancho and Rocinante. Or, even better, have him manage the little restaurant La Dulcinea on Trinket Island.

victor-manuel-dominguez.thumbnailAbout the Author

Victor Manuel Dominguez is an independent journalist. He lives in Central Havana.

 

*Translator’s note: Lyrics to the Los Aldeanos rap video linked to are available here (in Spanish)

Translated by Mary Lou Keel

Human Development in a Country without Freedom? / Cubanet, Jose Hugo Fernandez

represion-1

The regime has dedicated itself to sugarcoating the pill for organizations like the UN, UNESCO and UNICEF

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Jose Hugo Fernandez, Havana, 23 June 2015 – Recently, during a conference at the University of Puerto Rico, I was astonished to hear how a teacher cited Cuba as such an example of Human Development for the Caribbean region and the whole continent. No political deliberation was evident in her statements. She simply appealed to statistics and reports by international institutions, apparently trusting completely in the reputation of the issuer, and without reference to other more vital sources for comparison. The thing is that it made me feel ashamed somehow of representing my country under circumstances in which perhaps I should have felt proud.

The cynical compromise, well structured and promptly placed in orbit, can become a historical fact. Machiavelli had it right, more than five centuries ago, so how much better will our chiefs, his gifted students, have learned it, even if they act much more savagely. continue reading

After shredding almost all basis for Human Development on our little island, this regime has dedicated itself, with cold and careful patience, to sugarcoating the pill for prestigious organizations like the UN, UNESCO and UNICEF (and, through them, the international academic sphere, particularly that of the European Union), in order to round off the massacre, making the civilized world believe that its dictatorship – ingrown and even wild in more than one respect – represents a revolutionary project of humanistic and emancipating character.

It will fall to historians and sociologists or anthropologists and maybe to the psychiatrists of the future to explain how, by what devices of insane policy or under what kind of deception, they managed to win the upper hand. But what is certain is that last year Cuba occupied 44th place among the world’s countries with the best Human Development indices, and it is among the best in the Caribbean. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry in the face of that piece of information, but so it appears in the most serious records, those which inevitably serve as reference as much for the naïve and dandruff-covered “experts” as for the clever accomplices.

Although it is more, it should be pointed out that, as conceived by the UN itself, the Human Development of each nation is measured, above all, by the chance the bulk of its inhabitants live a life that meets their expectations and that permits them to develop all their potential as human beings.

And so we have a country where the only dream of the young is to flee, even risking life, in search of material and spiritual growth. Or where old people constitute a burden that no one can tackle and that, therefore, moves no one, including the State. Or where citizens are excluded, harassed, jailed for their political ideas. Or where work has lost its function as the sustenance for family existence and the essence of national progress… That country now ranks as a paradigm of Human Development.

A couple of years ago, the vice minister of foreign relations for Cuba, Abelardo Moreno, blatantly lied in testimony before the Universal Periodic Review (EPU) of the United Nations Human Rights Council that his government has recognized in its laws the indivisibility and interdependence of all human, political, social and economic rights.

He also said, just like that, that the decrepit dictatorship that he was representing had submitted to the EPU “without discrimination, without double standards and without selectivity.”

The strange thing, I insist, is not that he would say it but that there and everywhere he was believed without it occurring to anyone to undertake onsite and in depth verification which, as we know, is fundamental for the most basic scientific conclusions.

In the end, it is not my purpose to bore my dear readers with more small talk about the same thing. So it is that I merely set forth some other parameters that are used as a guide for measuring the Human Development of a country:

Respect for human rights. A solid economy based on cutting edge technology to make it work. Civil society and autonomous and empowered democratic institutions. Equality between people, regardless of any prejudice. End of discrimination on the basis of sex, race, ethnic, class or religious origin. Freedom of thought and of expression. Elimination of fear of threats to personal security, arbitrary detention and other violent acts for political reasons. Elimination of misery. Freedom to develop and fully achieve the potential of each individual. Elimination of injustice and violations of the law by the state. Opportunities and guarantees of decent work without exploitation.

Those who take the trouble of weighing these parameters, they will tell me now if Cuba practices only one of them to sustain its Human Development trick. As for the rest, as Jesus Christ would say, he who wants to understand does understand.

About the Author

jhfernandez.thumbnailJose Hugo Fernandez is the author of, among other works, the novels The Clan of the Suicides, The Crimes of Aurika, The Butterflies Don’t Flutter on Saturdays and The Parabola of Belen with the Pastors, as well as two books of stories, The Island of the Black Blackbirds and I Who Was the Streetcar of Desire, and the book of articles Silhouette Against the Wall. He lives in Havana where he has worked as an independent journalist since 1993.

Translated by MLK

Domestic Tourism, the Faces of Deceit / Cubanet, Ernesto Perez Chang

Cuban guests can only observe foreigners enjoy yachting trips.  They are prohibited from this activity (photo by the author)
Cuban guests can only observe foreigners enjoy yachting trips. They are prohibited from this activity (photo by the author)

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Ernesto Perez Chang, Havana, 16 June 2015 — To judge by the avalanche of television programs that in recent weeks have been dedicated to so-called “domestic tourism,” in Cuba all families have adequate income to become a major market for the island’s hotel groups and resorts.

Several Round Tables with the participation of ministers, vice-ministers, and company heads, all tied to the tourism sector, plus extensive reports on the Cuban Television National News detail the offers for this summer, present promotional campaigns in hotels and shopping centers and exhort the “Cuban family” to make reservations as soon as possible due to high demand.

The propagandistic marathon gives the sense that the economies within our homes are booming and that this country, replete with multitudes living below the poverty line, only exists in “enemy propaganda.” continue reading

As anyone can find out if he wants to, within those same tourist centers “open to everyone,” it is difficult to find guests from our own backyard. Nevertheless, at the doors of the hotels one can collect statements from people who not even in their dreams are permitted the fantasy of “vacationing” on equal terms with foreigners.

Although many may seem to be indigent or to owe their poverty to a slight entrepreneurial spirit, talking with any of those vendors and hustlers who abound in the streets of Cuba can reveal to us that it is those same men and women, workers and professionals, who once believed in that perennial “sacrifice for the future” demanded by those same government officials who today, when speaking of vacations and complete availability in the midst of the daily miseries, inoculate them with a sense of personal failure.

Manolo, a street vendor with whom we spoke on a corner of Paseo del Prado tells us: “I worked my whole life, I was at the sugar harvest when needed, I was in all the mobilizations and I was in the vanguard for many years, and I have nothing. (…) My pension does not cover my needs, like almost everyone. How am I going to plan a vacation? Only one time, in 1983, could I go to a house on the beach in Guanabo, a week, and now I don’t even remember why it was. Vacations are for the rich, and in this country almost everyone is poor, so I don’t know what they’re talking about on television. Well, there they say anything. My son tells me that if I want to consume everything they talk about on the television, I have to put a basket underneath it, because they only exist on the news.”

Manolo’s experience is similar to that of thousands, maybe millions, of Cubans. Collecting testimony about the matter is not hard, and this makes it much more dramatic.

German, another old retiree who sells plastic bags in the streets of Old Havana, could give the impression that he wasted his time when young and that he did not exert himself to achieve greater welfare in his old age; however, like any decent Cuban he believed in work as the only source of prosperity and currently he feels cheated. Vacation in one of the tourist facilities promoted as a vacation destination by the government itself is a true luxury: “What do I do then? It is better not to even think of those things. (…) I never pay attention to what they say on television. They have their country and we, ours,” German tells me.

In cahoots with the journalists who lend themselves to hiding the true reality in a country where the word “vacation” has become empty of all meaning, government officials have the audacity to speak of “affordable prices,” of “overbooking” and “high demand” in a scenario where the entire year’s salary from an honest professional’s job is not high enough to even provide the enjoyment of one day in hotel in Cayo Coco or Varadero, two of the destinations that, according to the official press and the highest tourism authorities in Cuba, “are among the most in demand by the domestic tourist for the coming months of July and August, a time when Cubans comprise 45 percent of those vacationing.” The statistics from MINTUR, contrasted with Cubans’ hard day-to-day reality, are offensive.

A brief visit to any of the internet pages where businesses like Cubanacan or Islazul promote their summer products, aimed at the “domestic market,” show how “cheap” the offers can be even for those same official reporters who barely receive more than 20 dollars for their work.

A basic room in a low or medium level hotel costs, for only one person, between 25 and 70 dollars per night, without counting that the so-called “domestic tourist” does not receive the same treatment as a foreign visitor so that there exist payment and service options totally closed to Cubans. For example, outings on yachts or any motor boat are off limits for even the few Cubans with enough purchasing power (and who, of course, are not relatives of high military officers or leaders); so are those vacation packages that include underwater fishing or big game hunting in preserves devoted only to the country’s upper echelons.

Doctors and health specialists who return from missions abroad where they are paid in dollars, people who live on considerable remittances from relatives in exile, prostitutes, smugglers and corrupt leaders make up that mass of citizens favored by the changes in the policy of access to tourist facilities. A minority that the Cuban government insists on turning into the best face of that capitalist-socialism and into a shield in order to hide the accumulation of lies that constitutes that old populist discourse that, in current circumstances, no longer is suitable but that constituted that sad and skinny losing horse called the “Cuban Revolution” on which they obliged us to bet in a race they always knew was lost.

Click here for the author page for Ernesto Perez Chang

Translated by MLK

Professionals of ‘Snitching’ / Cubanet, Camilo Ernesto Olivera

"Combative vigilants." Sign about the CDR (photo from the internet)
“Combative vigilants.” Sign about the CDR (photo from the internet)

cubanet square logoCubanet.org, Camilo Ernesto Olivera Peidro, 18 June 2015 – An old man is going out of his house in the little village named Henequen Viejo, near the Port of Mariel. Everyone there knows him as Alfonso. In reality, his name is Idelfonso Estevez. At first glance he seems like an old man like so many others.

However, the village’s inhabitants and his closest family members fear and hate him. Alfonso is not surrounded by the protective affection of his fellow man. The local members of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) take care of him. He is one of their most notorious “snitches.”

His story began years ago. He belonged to a group known as the “Guarapitos”: Alfonso, Jesus, El Viola, Camilo and Titico Borrego. They formed a group of auxiliaries in service to MININT at the beginning of the 1970’s. They dedicated themselves to watching everyone in Henequen Viejo. They gave away those who opposed the regime or anyone who annoyed them. They turned the area into a stronghold of terror. continue reading

When the property seizures began in the early months of 1959, the “Guarapitos” proposed ravaging a farm named La Francesa belonging to Pedro “Pepin” Carbonell and his family. The “Guarapitos” arrived and confiscated the largest cattle and slaughtered them for their consumption. No one could touch them. It was futile to try to denounce them to the authorities. They were protected by being efficient tools of Revolutionary terror.

Later other individuals joined the group with the same vocation of informing. Among them were Faustino Sanchez, Lucas Cabrera Lugo (Tatico) and Benito Mirabal.

Benito Mirabal and the Fisherman

They nicknamed Benito Mariabal “Moustache.” For years, he was one of the most prominent snitching characters in the region. He denounced people trying to leave the country and also reported street vendors. He was sent by State Security officers to watch, day and night, those named as dissidents.

In the last years of his life a rare disease attacked his legs. The doctors diagnosed it as gaseous gangrene, and they had to amputate them.

While Benito was hospitalized, the fisherman residing in the area, friends of his family, brought good and fresh fish for his nourishment. Several of them used to and do make their living from what they catch at sea.

Sometime after having recovered, Moustache Mirabal asked one of his grandsons to take him, in his wheelchair, to the nearest guard post. Once there, he denounced those same fishermen who had fed him. He accused them of illegal fishing. Several of the fishermen lost their licenses, had their boats confiscated or were fined.

Idelfonso Estevez (Alfonso), active snitch.  Henequen Mariel (photo courtesy of the author)
Idelfonso Estevez (Alfonso), active snitch. Henequen Mariel (photo courtesy of the author)

Alfonso is capable of snitching even on his mother if she were resurrected

Certainly Idelfonso Estevez may seem like just another old man when he goes out of his house. But right now he is known as the “greatest trumpet” (biggest informer) in Henequen Viejo.

So that no one may doubt his unlimited commitment to the regime, he has placed on the fence around his house several pro-government signs. One of them alludes to a sentence of Raul Castro and the other advertises the “process” (sic) for strengthening the Committee in Defense of the Revolution (CDR).

"We must advance at the pace we Cubans decide, without haste but without pause." Signs on the yard fence at the house of Idelfonso Estevez (photo by the author)
“We must advance at the pace we Cubans decide, without haste but without pause.” Signs on the yard fence at the house of Idelfonso Estevez (photo by the author)

A family source who asked to remain anonymous told us that during the Special Period, this man’s refrigerator was all eaten away with salt residue, and he needed it fixed. A nephew, who did this kind of work informally, restored it for him at no charge. Two blocks away lived Ricardo, brother of Idelfonso. He had a little chain saw with which he did carpenter work. Neighbors commissioned broomsticks, knife handles, and things of that sort.

Two weeks later there appeared in the area two inspectors. They came checking on who had private jobs without being licensed and paying taxes. They went to see Idelfonso, and he, without thinking twice, denounced his nephew and his brother. Idelfonso, “The Guarapitos” and all the guys that are like him, would “snitch” even on his mother if she were resurrected, he said.

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Camilo Ernesto Olivera Peidro

Translated by MLK